Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Monday, June 27, 2016

Meander through a shared American and Israeli Exceptionalism

When Americans looked at World
War 2 Europe, what they saw was a continent addicted to war where protection
from tyranny took a barely material second place to what was clearly a wholly
discredited nationalism.When Americans
tried to understand why war was second nature to Europeans they concluded that Europe was fatally flawed by its inability to move past
its narrowly regimented ethnocentric national interest.And so the Marshall Plan (before it became
overtaken by the Cold War) was the first volley fired in the war on the
bellicosity of European chauvinism and towards the creation of a supranational
union that would bind all the old enemies into one united super-state.

It has been observed that
Europeans and those people of the ‘old world’ viewed strategic decision making
based on their history.It was backward
facing and unsuited to resolving its own issues without recourse to violence.The USA had a mere few hundreds of
years of history to proclaim, so it made its own future, based on imagination
and idealism.It is here that its
entrepreneurial spirit was nurtured.

This forward looking approach is
the reason that Israelis and Americans are usually vilified in the same breath.
Both nations are representatives of the ‘new world’ - implicit in the name is a
rejection of the old ways and its tainted history.

Both nations have been forced
into defensive or offensive positions by their ideological enemies.Both are yet to come to terms with the ‘old
world’ reality which is an intellectual incapacity to learn from history. The
question is not whether a clash of civilizations can be appeased (because it
cannot) but how and whether, mutually exclusive ambitions are capable of
reconciliation?

If the over-arching principle
that drives the USA
is safeguarding its national political institutions, the subsequent failure to
protect human rights is a fundamental failure of strategic understanding. It
should be noted that Britain
is similarly deluded in its approach to tyranny. Without a philosophical
commitment to freedom for all, political liberty may be used as the means by
which tyranny spreads and infects the body of the nation.Like a microbial infestation, fascism, which
is the application of tyranny, honors no borders. Universal human rights can
only be possible if they are equally understood and crucially, applied equally.
Without certain fundamental rules of engagement (see next paragraph), political
liberty is little more than a vehicle used to expedite fascism which in this
case signifies both a pretense to equal human rights and a particular bias
against equal protection before the law.That final conditional inequality undermines society.

The fundamental rules of
engagement are the most simple to apply.All people are welcome to take shelter under the cultural umbrella that
defines the society into which they have sought refuge, as long as they do not
cherry pick what they are willing to accept. Democratic nations are united by
the consensus they live out and not by the selective tolerance they provide to
people who reject any accommodation with them. Similarly, the so called ‘nanny
state’ is created, not by being too caring but by failing to inculcate in
everyone a narrative of personal responsibility both towards each other and
towards the society they share.

According to Michael B. Oren
the refusal to accept responsibility is the largest single obstacle to
fostering democracy and forging peaceful co-existence between peoples of different
backgrounds. (‘New Essays on Zionism’ 2006)

Zionism is the Jewish right to
self-determination. Its failure was that in its wider utopian Universalist naivety it did not
appreciate the opposing Muslim theological narrative of religious triumphalism
and an Arab conquest narrative that was (and remains to this day) inextricably
intertwined with Islamic identity, revanchism and a need to sow
discord among its competitors and ideological enemies.Again, Michael Oren expresses
this well when he says: “Islam developed during a period when Muslims ruled
most of the civilized world” therefore “Islam harbors no misgivings regarding
power – the attainment of power is incumbent on every individual Muslim. Arab
Muslims thus have a problem with a palpably powerful Jewish State.” – ibid

Zionism’s failure to understand
the hegemonic nature of Islamic society should have served as a lesson for Europe’s enthusiastic proponents of integration and unity.In Britain, the head of the Equality
and Human Rights Commission (Trevor Phillips OBE) publicly decried
multiculturalism claiming it was out of date and legitimized what divided communities
rather than encouraging what united them.

Israeldoes need
to fight harder against the coercive, voluntary segregation of culturally
disparate (Arab and ultra-orthodox) communities. Michael Oren proposes that we flag-waivers for
Zionism bear a weighty responsibility “to prove to ourselves, and the world
that the phrase ‘Jewish State’ is not in fact a contradiction in terms……(to
shoulder) the responsibilities of reconciling our heritage with our
sovereignty, our strength with our compassion, and our will to survive with our
desire to inspire others.” – ibid

Put another way, Zionism must
show its equal benefits to all its communities so that the compulsion to
embrace it becomes not just 9 till 5 but 24-7.

For the USA it is free markets and open
borders, where liberal values are a means to an end (social and economic
comfort).People who are comfortable do
not go out of their way to kill each other (unless they are political or theological
sociopaths). Prosperity should be the end result of a free market economy.However, like all absolutes, theory and
reality are dependent on the strength of human laws to hold back the darker
ambitions of human nature: greed, peoples’ blind passion for being right all of
the time (which inevitably means that they are wrong most of the time) and peoples
hunger for exercising power over others.

Neither restraint nor
intellectual pluralism is the modus operandi of a missionary faith or of a
zealous political ideology.Communism is
a political ideology with many of the attributes of an embryonic religious
faith. ‘Progressives’ and others on the extreme left of the political spectrum
inevitably share aspects of fascism.They include intolerance (they will mask it as ‘zeal’) for any
world-view that has not been sanctioned by their political bible, vigorous attempts to ostracize those people who disagree with them and their
tactics, and, proscription for any counter-narrative. The gauleiter of the secular
Inquisition thus ensures the right to free speech is no more than a
delusion, a basic right that is
only enjoyed by his or her followers.

American and Israeli Exceptionalism have at their (separate but
connected) heart and soul a Universalism that has the potential to benefit all
of humankind. It is only through intelligent engagement and careful language
that their shared idealism can be demonstrably proven correct, serving as a
light unto the nations of the world.